The Last Town (Book 3): Waiting For The Dead by Stephen Knight Page A

suddenly vanished. It crashed to the desert floor in an explosion of dust as the section of skull bounced off Klaff’s truck with a rattle. The brain flopped to the ground with a semi-wet plop.
    Klaff moaned in his throat slightly, feeling his gut roil. But upon closer inspection, there was no blood. There was a black substance that kind of looked like pulpy motor oil, but nothing that he could immediately identify as blood. He let out a sour-smelling belch, but that was it. His stomach leveled out then, and Klaff was grateful. He didn’t want to puke in front of the boys.
    “You guys all right?” Ramos screamed as he pounded up to a stop beside Chester. He peered down at the corpse lying beside the truck, its sightless eyes peering into the bright, cloudless sky overhead. “Holy chit, it’s a fucking zombie, man!”
    Klaff felt a tremor go through him when his adrenaline-charged body finally checked in with his brain. He had just killed a zombie. A zombie that had come out from the desert.
    “Where there’s one, there’s more,” he said, and his voice sounded weak and distant.
    Chester and Ramos looked over at him as more men ran up. Klaff swallowed hard and looked at the mountain-studded horizon. Chester and Ramos did as well, while the rest of the guys hovered over the motionless corpse, gawking at it and wondering just what the hell happened.
    We have to tell Barry about this, Klaff thought. If these things are already walking up on us, then we’re in a heap of trouble.
     
    ###
     
    “God damn it, if you make me shit myself, I’ll make sure you guys burn,” Clarence Doddridge said.
    “Hold it, Doddridge,” said the fat corrections officer with the shotgun. He was behind the Plexiglas partition that separated the prison transfer bus’s crew from the seven prisoners in the rear. The man was short with a flat-top crew cut and a thick mustache that he’d dyed so black that it practically screamed fake. The officer’s eyes were unreadable behind his mirrored sunglasses, but Doddridge knew what he’d see there if the dude’s eyes were visible. Fear.
    Doddridge liked that.
    “I cain’t hold it no longer,” Doddridge complained. “You fuckers already let this white boy over here piss himself, and I’m sure the rest of us gotta go, too. You gotta let us go to the bathroom, man.” He pointed to the man sitting before him in the bus, as much as the manacles that bound him to his seat would allow. The skinny white guy—a convicted drug dealer, Doddridge knew—just whimpered, sitting in a puddle of his own cold piss.
    “We ain’t gotta do shit for you, convict,” the fat man snapped back.
    “Well, I’m gonna do shit for you if you don’t let me outta here,” Doddridge said. And this time, he was telling the truth. He and the rest of the prisoners had been on the bus for almost three days. What was supposed to have been a quick transfer from Atwater Federal Penitentiary to the US Pen in Victorville was taking a hell of a long time. The route had been changed from a straight shot to the south due to the evacuation traffic coming out of Los Angeles, and the bus had started off heading north toward San Francisco before taking a big right turn and circling down on US 395. The fact that the bus was one of the older models without a bathroom on board didn’t make the time pass by any faster. There were only so many places to stop where prisoners could do their business.
    Doddridge didn’t exactly know or care what was going on in the world, but what little of it he could see, he could tell it was bad. Through the bus’s small, mesh-reinforced windows, he could see vehicle after vehicle full of people, belongings, pets, whatever, clogging up both lanes. The bus was moving at maybe two or three miles an hour, and had been for most of the day. None of this really mattered to him. This was likely the closest Doddridge would ever get to being a free man, unless something wonderful happened. He was a